Leaders of a prominent Southern Baptist seminary who believe women are biblically forbidden from teaching men were within their rights when they told a female professor to leave, a federal judge has ruled.

Sheri Klouda was the only female professor teaching at the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary’s School of Theology when officials decided not to renew her contract in 2006. Klouda claimed seminary officials breached an oral contract guaranteeing she would remain employed if her performance was favorable.

Seminary officials maintain Klouda was not dismissed but was told she would not be granted tenure. They said their actions were based on ecclesiastical decisions protected under theFirst Amendment’s religion clauses. U.S. District Judge John McBryde agreed, dismissing Klouda’s claims Wednesday….

Seminary President Paige Patterson issued a statement saying he is thankful for the decision….

According to the 2000 Baptist Faith and Message, the denomination’s most recent statement of beliefs, both men and women can serve the church but the office of pastor is limited to men. The statement is based on a verse in 1st Timothy in which the Apostle Paul says, “I permit no woman to teach or have authority over a man.”

After he was elected seminary president, Patterson told officials he believed all those teaching future ministers at the school of theology should be qualified to serve as pastors themselves….

Here’s the kicker:

Klouda, who now teaches at Taylor University in Upland, Ind., points out she taught Hebrew and Aramaic at the seminary.

“The biggest contradiction is that Dr. Patterson and Southwestern and … all of us agree that I am not a minister or pastor,” Klouda said.

While the First Amendment was properly upheld in this case, Patterson has shown that he was a poor thinker about these issues when he was establishing his policies.

Did the Apostle Paul have a specific context for his use of the word teach? Perhaps he was referring to doctrinal or theological or expository matters?

Is it necessary to have men “qualified to serve as pastors themselves” to teach languages in a seminary?

Do you want to keep women (like Klouda) from exercising their gifts of teaching languages? Do you want to limit the reach of those gifts?

As to the matter of authority, Dr. Patterson, if you’re on the operating table in an emergency room, and your doctor is a female — who will ostensibly have to exercise her authority over some male hospital staffers in the process of saving your life — should she wait until a male doctor is available? (God keep you, Dr. Patterson, but some feminists would have an ironic answer.)

In regards to the sex of a teacher, is receiving Red Cross training from a woman any different than receiving Hebrew and Aramaic training from a woman?

Just a few questions for a man who, in his zeal to be biblical, has applied a verse far more broadly than the Bible warrants.

WATERLOO, ON. — If you identify yourself as Christian, what kind of Christian are you? That’s the question being asked by researchers in an online survey designed to give participants personalized insight into their faith.
The Rev. Marsha Cutting of the Waterloo Lutheran Seminary heads a team of researchers from Wilfrid Laurier University, Liberty University and Boston University in developing the research instrument, called the Inclusive Christian Scale.

After responding to questions about their faith, participants will receive a score showing where their beliefs lie across six different emphases that an individual Christian might have: Congregational Involvement, Evangelical, Christian Conservative, Golden Rule, Activist, and Mystical. Participants are then asked how accurately they feel these scores reflect their own understanding of their faith.

“We need to have a good instrument that accurately represents the people we’re trying to study,” said Cutting, an associate professor of pastoral care and counselling at Laurier. “Our research on religion and its relationship to other issues is undercut if we can’t do a good job of defining who is religious.”

Researchers hope to attract participants representing different ages, genders and ethnicities. Those interested in participating can visit www.religiosityscalesproject.com.

The instrument being tested in the study will be used in research that examines how religion relates to specific subjects such as health, prejudice or voting behaviour.

The Inclusive Christian Scale is the second part of the larger Religiosity Scales Project. It is designed to address the limitations of previous scales, which tended to be more conservative in nature and didn’t accurately capture the full range of Christian faith.

-Distributed by Religion Press Release Services, a division of the Religion News Service

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Incapable of doubt, incapable of faith

The majority of mankind is lazy-minded, incurious, absorbed in vanities, and tepid in emotion, and is therefore incapable of either much doubt or much faith. -- T.S. Eliot, Introduction (1931), Pascal's "Pensees"

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Problem or Mystery?

A problem is something which I meet, which I find completely before me, but which I can therefore lay siege to and reduce. But a mystery is something in which I am myself involved, and it can therefore only be thought of as a sphere where the distinction between what is in me and what is before me loses its meaning and initial validity. -- Gabriel Marcel

Our Ways of Understanding

"Our ways of understanding have been collective, beginning with the stories that we told each other around the fire when we lived in caves. Our ways today are still collective, including literature, history, art, music, religion, and science." - Freeman Dyson

"Referee won't blow the whistle / God is good but will he listen?" -- U2

In that very first episode the transmission is received on the starship Enterprise that Space Commander Dominguez urgently needs his supplies. Kirk tells Uhura to assure him that the peppers are “prime Mexican reds but he won’t die if he goes a few more days without ’em.”Calm down Mexican.You can wait a few more days to get your chile peppers. In the corne […]

[Revised entry by Sheila Rabin on September 13, 2019. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Nicolaus Copernicus (1473 - 1543) was a mathematician and astronomer who proposed that the sun was stationary in the center of the universe and the earth revolved around it. Disturbed by the failure of Ptolemy's geocentric model of the universe to follow Aristotle […]

[Revised entry by Don A. Howard and Marco Giovanelli on September 13, 2019. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955) is well known as the most prominent physicist of the twentieth century. His contributions to twentieth-century philosophy of science, though of comparable importance, are less well known. Einstein's o […]

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Liturgy For The People

The liturgy is essentially not the religion of the cultured, but the religion of the people. If the people are rightly instructed, and the liturgy is properly carried out, they display a simple and profound understanding of it. For the people do not analyze concepts, but contemplate. The people possess that inner integrity of being which corresponds perfectly with the symbolism of the liturgical language, imagery, action and ornaments. The cultured man has first of all to accustom himself to this attitude; but to the people it has always been inconceivable that religion should express itself by abstract ideas and logical developments, and not by being and action, by imagery and ritual. --Romano Guardini, "The Awakening of the Church in the Soul"

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The Anguished Question

If you really enquire about God, not with mere curiosity, not, as it were, like a spiritual stamp collector, but as an anxious seeker, distressed in heart, anguished by the possibility that God might not exist and hence all life be vanity and one great madness -- if you ask in such a mood as the man who asks the doctor, "Tell me, will my wife live or will she die?"-- if you ask thus about God, then you know already that God exists; the anguished question bears witness that you know.
-- Emil Brunner, "Our Faith"